Buffy the Vampire Slayer Opinion Article

tarehe Rape Orb

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Dead Things”, the Trio goes out on the town with the magical equivalent of a tarehe rape drug, what they call the cerebral dampener. According to Warren, the dampener has the power to make any woman their “willing” sex slave. However, either he misunderstood the definition of “willing” au he was flat out lying, because the dampener’s function clearly is to remove all free will. Warren’s always been portrayed as a creep, so this makes sense for him, but it’s strange that Andrew and Jonathan fail to recognize the act as rape until their victim Katrina explicitly tells them. Why didn’t they see what they were doing as rape? Can this shed some light on real life culture that may promote rape?

Katrina: “You bunch of little boys, playing at being men. Well, this is not some fantasy. It’s not a game, wewe freaks! It’s rape!”Jonathan: “What?”Andrew: “No… we didn’t…”Katrina: “You’re all sick.”

The main thing about the Trio is that they’re playing. They’re doing serious things, acts of villainy, as a game. It’s fun to be supervillains and try to take over Sunnydale. It’s like they think they’re LARPing even as they’re committing real crimes, sometimes really trying to kill people.

What they try to do is the fulfillment of fantasies. They want to kill the Slayer… why? Because she represents the forces of good, her defeat a goal in the same sort of way as Superman’s defeat is a goal of Lex Luther as part of an ongoing plot to take over Metropolis. The Trio view themselves as supervillains, so Buffy fits into their model of what supervillains do. Problem is, only Warren is ruthless enough to actually want to kill Buffy, as the others like her. After all, she saved them a lot from the forces of evil back in high school.

Aside from killing au otherwise defeating Buffy, their goals include controlling the weather, miniaturizing Fort Knox, conjuring fake IDs, a shrink ray, girls, girls, “The Gorilla Thing” (???), becoming rich through robbing banks (which they attempt twice), spying on women in a spa through the creation of an invisibility ray intended for use on themselves, and becoming super strong with magic demon orbs. Let’s talk about the invisibility ray plot, which is similar to the use of the dampener in that the end is in attaining sexual satisfaction.

Warren and Jonathan are both heterosexual, while Andrew is gay but in denial, and they all hold women to be some grand unattainable goal. Warren is a controlling creep who is unable to hold onto his girlfriend Katrina because he constantly disrespects her as well as presumably all women. Jonathan is socially challenged, and has only got attention from girls either when they use him (Ampata, Cordelia) au when he uses the Mary Sue spell to make him seem to be the coolest person in the world. That can be a big blow to the self esteem, and we know he did consider suicide at one point. Andrew is a highly submissive gay geek who falls into the heterosexual geek obsessions with getting hot women, once expressing a ndoto that “Scully wants [him] so bad.” Moreover, Andrew follows Warren, with who he develops a secret relationship that’s actually Warren’s manipulation, and he molds himself into what he thinks Warren approves of. So, the Trio are basically united in together wanting women for sexual purposes, considering women as unattainable through proper romance, and disrespecting them to varying degrees.

The thing about their quest to see women naked is that they think they deserve it with au without the consent of the women they plan to ogle. The issue of consent doesn’t ever seem to occur to them, with the possible exception of Warren who is both zaidi aware of their evil and zaidi accepting of it. The idea seems to be that they deserve to get to see women naked for no other reason than that it would bring them sexual satisfaction, and because they are unable to get it the traditional way kwa means of dating then it’s fine to engage in voyeurism. They don’t care about the fact that the people they intend to ogle are actually people who obviously don’t want to be ogled. While Warren is the obvious misogynist, the others share a general disrespect of women.

So, then we come to the tarehe rape orb, as I call it, the cerebral dampener. While it would appear to be Warren’s brainchild, the others definitely go along with it with some enthusiasm. When Warren makes a preliminary sweep to tafuta for a victim with Andrew and Jonathan watching through a video feed, Andrew and Jonathan marvel at the power and ability they have to possess any woman of their choosing, making gross comparisons to candy. Warren spots his ex-girlfriend and decides to acquire her, his motive to assert his masculinity aggressively to prove his superiority. His later dialog in “Seeing Red” with a guy who used to pick on him suggests that he does his supervillainy to feel validated.

When Katrina comes out of her thrall she yells at the Trio, telling Warren to face the fact that she broke up with him. Andrew and Jonathan react with surprise, Andrew saying that Warren hypnotizing his ex is “messed up”. One has to wonder why that they find messed up but not the rest of it. I think it’s because they saw the whole tarehe rape plot as like a game, their supervillainous attempt to make society conform to them, but Warren’s upendo life is seen as serious, thus making it messed up to bring mind control ndoto to it. Once Katrina informs them that what they’re doing is rape, they react first with denial, followed kwa realization after being able to seriously think about it.

The Trio is to some degree a humorous mockery of Buffy fans. We are, after all, geeks, as are the writers themselves. The Trio is relatable because they are somewhat like us. They are definitely sillier than most geeks, which make them amusing to watch, and their edginess takes them beyond normal geeks, but they come from the same general place as many real geeks.

Geek culture, which is predominantly male, contains a widespread meme of entitlement to sexual satisfaction. Geeks have the trait of being snubbed kwa the dominant culture, leading to a sense of resentment. In geek culture there is an ujumla, jumla sense of celebrating things that fuel heterosexual male sexuality to the point of disrespecting women in general. In male-only geek forums, everything builds off of each other, and it can reach the point of promoting misogyny veiled in the guise of just joking around. I speak from personal experience. It can get nasty.

So from this supu is where the Trio is supposed to have come from. If we look at the worst of what can come from geek culture, it does kind of make sense that Andrew and Jonathan were unable to understand the seriousness of the crime they were committing. Is Warren the inevitable product of cultural misogyny and entitlement, au is he just a bad egg in the geek omelet? If we look back in “I Was Made To upendo You”, we see that Warren was fairly misogynistic even before we knew he was that into geek culture. He was known to be geeky in that he built a robot, but that just means he’s smart like Willow, who is geeky to some extent but not really into geek culture. I’d say Warren is supposed to be just naturally twisted, but the culture certainly doesn’t help, as it helped him snare Andrew and Jonathan.

In conclusion, the Trio was influenced kwa unfortunate trends in geek culture that led them toward misogynistic practices. While Warren is definitely evil, Andrew and Jonathan are also to blame for their acceptance of notions that hold women to be sexual objects, if only within specific circumstances that they can rationalize as the deserved fruits of their clever supervillainy. Because of the geek culture actually existing in a troublesome way in the real world, I have to wonder if it may promote real rape to geeks like the characters of Andrew and Jonathan, au if it might have been Joss’ intent to criticize such culture with his show.

5 comments

I'd say Jonathan and Andrew didn't see it as rape till it was explicitly said to them, because they lied to themselves as it was easier for them to not even think of it that way. If they thought about it they'd see the truth, but they didn't let themselves because they wanted to use the power without taking responsibility. The same way Andrew told himself he believed the first was Warren in s7, but admitted a part of him always knew it wasn't when Buffy forced him to, a part of them always knew what they were doing was sick, but they didn't allow themselves to think of it that way. They lied to themselves because it made using that power easier, and didn't admit to even themselves that it was wrong until they saw irrefutable evidence of how they'd hurt someone (Katrina's horror at what had been done to her). Personally, the reason I think they found Warren's use of the spell on an ex 'messed up' but not on women in general is just that seeing her as a girlfriend humanised her. It forced them to admit to themselves she wasn't just a really realistic blow up doll, she was a person. Seeing her as a person, being forced to see her reaction to what they'd done, removed their ability to lie to themselves about what they did.

I highly doubt this would promote rape to geeks, because they are clearly meant to be the bad guys. Seeing Katrina's reaction should be more than enough to show where the writers stood on the issue. I think the whole point of the plot was to show why Warren is dangerous. Up till that point it was easy to think 'he's just the leader of a gang of nerds. Why exactly should we fear him as a villain? he has no power'. But he actually did have a power. He had a great ability to influence people. To get them to do real evil without ever seeing it as bad. We know Andrew and Jonathan. Neither of them were evil, yet Warren turned them into murderous rapists with practically no effort. That was his 'superpower'. That's what made him, despite appearances, an effective and scary villain. I think this episode was meant as a wake up call. A foreshadowing of what Warren could and would do. It was the writers saying 'no, he's not a hopeless dork. This is an evil guy, take him seriously as a danger'.

I think it was more me being distracted/dippy than you unclear (I was watching Dollhouse while reading, lol) btw I meant to say, good article, interesting and well written. I just realised that in my rambly first comment I forgot that part (again I blame Dollhouse distractions)

"Andrew is gay but in denial" - This is quite a logical and possible reading, as there are hints and jokes about Andrew's sexuality to that effect. But I like the fact that it's intentionally ambiguous. If it wasn't, Andrew's moment in "The Girl In Question" wouldn't have been possible. Andrew's classically true line, "People change," would not have been as effective if he didn't exit with two women hanging off each arm.

True, one could still argue that these women are the result of Andrew continuing his denial, but if that were the case, would his line be as effective? Tom Lenk is gay. But I'm not so sure about Andrew.

I know this wasn't an article on Andrew's sexuality, but I did want to point that out.

"the others share a general disrespect of women." - I agree with Mermaid-Tail on this one. Half your article is about how Andrew and Jonathan consider it a game, and very naively so. In the same vein, they don't see Katrina as a person, but rather a character, like Princess Leia in the gold bikini. True, it's not classy, or respectful, but it's no different than any other guy with a Leia fantasy. Warren, however, is a complete and total predator, and that is absolutely true. But I don't think the other two have a "general disrespect" for women in the same way at all. I think they disrespect Katrina, but I think the rest of it is all talk, all pretend, like their games. Katrina's reality check helped them realize what it was exactly that they were doing. Like Mermaid-Tail said, it humanized her.

I've talked with my friends (jokingly) about if I had the chance, I'd punch Ann Coulter. I've had world domination discussions, blowing-up-the-moon discussions... I've talked about killing the armies of my friends in Risk in very dramatic tones. But all of that was just play. I probably wouldn't punch Ann Coulter. In all honesty, I don't even hate her as much as I claim to. And I definitely won't do any of the other stuff (as the "armies" of my friends are just plastic). Andrew and Jonathan were deluding themselves to protect themselves from their conscience... or they were just crazy naive. Or both. But I don't think they're misogynistic. Just victims of (Warren's) suggestion.

link at Whedonesque to clear up the issue of Andrew's sexuality. The gist is that there should have been men and women there, the "people change" line was there when it was Dawn and not Andrew, and Andrew's sexuality is always on the cusp of self-awareness.

Warren is definitely the evil one of the Trio; Andrew is dangerous because of the way he idolizes Warren; and Jonathan is the basically good guy who gets in over his head. I agree Warren is the misogynist, and he's really in a different category from the other two. It's just this general disrespect, which I consider different from Warren's full blown hate, that shows up when Jonathan and Andrew intend to spy on women or during the "preliminary sweep".